Report -Sea Bathing Hospital/Hotel - Margate - 10/6/09

28DL Regular User

Found this on the rumours section so thought id find my old pictures to show you whats here to be done. Apologies for the quality of the photos, these were taken on my old camera, it really doesnt do this place justice, being the most in tact place ive seen other then inverkip =].

Ok so the Sea Bathing hospital dates back to 1791, and was used for various 'treatments' for tuberculosis (tb). At first, people who were being treated there were taken to the sea at westbrook bay, after the invention of 'the machine' (horse drawn cart with a canvas covering the patients nakedness from people around, they moved on further to having full indoor swimming pools filled with salt water, so that treatment could continue through the winter. Treatment and development continued, with succession. The Hotel remained as 'up to date' as it possibally could, but due to medical advancments, and the 'long stay' treatments becoming less popular, the Sea Bathing hospital was closed, in a matter of years, the QEQM (Margate) dramatically over took it with more up-to-date treatments and short stay plans.
It is rumoured that there a large network of tunnels that were dug for transporting and 'storing' patients during there period of being very contagious, it would not have made sense to be having nearly fully recovered patients come into contact with freshly ill ones and becoming sick again, ive heard that patients were sometimes kept down in the tunnels for up to four years at a time!

After a few weeks of reccy and trying to convince people that it was do-able, i finally decided to give it a shot, living local helped this a lot, although putting the plan to action was harder then originally anticipated as always.

It started with meeting up with Obscurity, Fortknox0, Gizmo and nik24 the night before and killing a few hours in Dover. Then me and Muffie got back to my house at about 11pm and sat up drinking coffee until about 4am, then left for our target, its about an hours walk away which i hadnt anticipated and by the time we got there the sun was already up, screw it, were here now and were not sitting up for another entire night!

The part of the complex i had originally thought to be empty is in fact not, so we ended up playing cat and mouse, while carrying a 15ft ladder which we found on site to try and help us out, i didnt .

We came to the conclusion that the ENTIRE old section of the original hospital is converted, we kept walking around until almost all hope was lost.

After taking this photo i looked through the window next to me, only to see a man peeping over the top of his morning paper, now, its generally difficult to try and blend in to your surroundings when your wearing combats and all black with a camera in your hand, but i think we pulled it off pretty well, we slyly disappeared and hid on the roof , time check, 7 am, not good!

Now back down to ground level, still having a nosey around, all ideas of there being anything empty had gone.

And then we found this! Access is hard to find, very, hard to find.

Muffie playing darts, yes, there were actually darts!

After sspending an hour or so inside the hotel, we emerged to take an external shot, right into the path of a patrolling security guard, he was about as shocked as we were, he took our details, threatened with police due to our lack of ID, asked if we were squatters, then let us go.